Strategy Hasn’t Bought Bitcoin in Five Weeks. Is Bitcoin Losing Its Biggest Corporate Buyer?

Strategy Hasn’t Bought Bitcoin in Five Weeks. Is Bitcoin Losing Its Biggest Corporate Buyer?

Sam Daodu

Wed, July 29, 2026 at 7:21 PM GMT+3 7 min read

• BTC-USD -0.27%

Quick Read

• Strategy hasn't bought Bitcoin in five weeks, marking its longest pause in nearly two years.

• Strategy spent $25 million buying back its STRC preferred stock and says future buybacks may be funded by selling MSTR shares and, depending on the market, Bitcoin.

• The company's 843,775 coins cost $63.68 billion and are worth about $53.9 billion today, leaving it roughly $9.8 billion underwater.

• Strategy named Bitcoin sales as a possible funding source for preferred stock buybacks, reversing the never-sell stance it held for years.

• Two retirees, same $1 million, same 4% rule, buy one finished with $1.4 million, the other hit $0 in 12 years. Our free reader guide explains the flaw that separated them, and the income-first method built to avoid it.

Strategy (NASDAQ:MSTR) spent $25 million last week buying back its own preferred stock and spent nothing on Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC). The company has now gone five weeks without a purchase, marking its longest pause in nearly two years.

On top of that, Strategy said in the same announcement that future buybacks may be paid for by selling its MSTR stock and, depending on market conditions, by selling Bitcoin. Is Bitcoin losing its biggest corporate buyer?

What Strategy Did Instead of Buying Bitcoin

Between July 20 and 26, Strategy bought back 288,930 shares of STRC, its preferred stock, paying about $25 million at an average of $86.52 against a stated value of $100. That was the first use of a $1 billion repurchase programme approved in June, and it leaves $975 million to spend.

The company also added $525 million to its dollar reserve from sales of its own common stock, lifting the reserve to an all-time high of $3.75 billion, which it says equals roughly 25 months of expected preferred dividend payments. The Bitcoin holdings didn't move, and Strategy still holds 843,775 coins, which is the same number as five weeks ago.

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Strategy buying the preferred stock back below its stated value has a clear logic. STRC pays a 12% annual dividend, which is expensive money, and management will recommend the board keep that rate until the stock shows sustained trading near $100.

Chief Executive Phong Le called repurchases below $100 "an attractive allocation of capital," since retiring a $100 obligation for $86.52 cuts the future dividends the company would owe on it. STRC has traded below its stated value since mid-May, falling under $77 this month before recovering to around $88.

But the question is where the money comes from. Under board policy, Strategy is not allowed to use the dollar reserve to fund these buybacks, and the company says the cash will come from other sources, which may include further sales of MSTR stock and, depending on market conditions, Bitcoin sales.

STRC was created to raise money for buying Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is now listed as a way to pay for supporting STRC. Strategy's own risk disclosures name the cost of the first route, since selling common stock to fund repurchases dilutes the people holding it.

Why Strategy Stopped Buying Bitcoin

For years, Strategy ran a loop that built the whole company. It sold new MSTR shares, used the cash to buy Bitcoin, and because the stock traded above the value of the Bitcoin behind it, shareholders ended up holding more Bitcoin per share after every round.

However, the loop only works while that premium exists. Investors track it through mNAV, which compares the company's whole valuation, debt included, against the value of its Bitcoin. Standard Chartered calculated in a July 10 note that the figure had fallen to roughly 1.0, down from well above that between 2020 and the middle of last year. At the November 2024 peak, investors paid 3.4 times the value of Strategy's Bitcoin to own the stock.

At 1.0, a dollar of new stock buys exactly a dollar of Bitcoin, and shareholders end up where they started, minus the cost of doing it. Selling stock to buy coins now leaves them slightly worse off each time, so the buying stopped because the trade stopped working, not because Strategy stopped believing in Bitcoin.

Meanwhile, Strategy still owes its preferred dividends whether it buys Bitcoin or not. STRC alone has about $10 billion outstanding, its 12% dividend keeps coming due whatever the Bitcoin price does, and the growing dollar reserve exists to keep those payments funded.

On top of that, Strategy's 843,775 coins cost $63.68 billion at an average of $75,476 each, and at today's price near $63,900 they're worth about $53.9 billion. The company is roughly $9.8 billion underwater, and Bitcoin would have to climb about 18% before Strategy is back to what it paid.

What Bitcoin Loses Without Strategy Buying

Strategy holds about 4% of every Bitcoin that will ever exist, more than any other company. Moreover, Strategy had started stepping back before it stopped buying. It sold 32 coins in late May, its first sale since 2022 and a break from the never-sell stance it had held for years.

Then, after two small purchases in June, it sold another 3,588 coins for about $216 million between June 29 and July 5, at average prices around $60,000 against the $75,476 it paid for them. Since then the company has neither bought nor sold.

Bitcoin trades near $63,900 now, roughly half the $126,000 ATH it set last October, and the price could move again when the Federal Reserve announces its latest interest rate decision later today. Meanwhile, wider corporate buying had already thinned before Strategy went quiet, with Glassnode's June 10 report showing that treasury companies went from buying more than $500 million on multiple days in April and May to almost nothing since the start of June.

However, Standard Chartered kept its $100,000 Bitcoin forecast for end of the year in its July 10 note, calling Strategy's selling mostly noise and arguing that if Strategy explains its new approach clearly, it should not need to sell more Bitcoin. But Strategy did the opposite on July 27, naming Bitcoin sales as a possible funding source in its own press release.

Will Strategy Buy Bitcoin Again?

Strategy hasn't sold a coin since July 5 and hasn't committed to selling more. For now the company has stopped adding while it builds its cash cushion, retires expensive obligations at a discount, and waits.

The wait has a condition attached. If Bitcoin recovers and the stock trades back above the value of the coins behind it, selling shares to buy Bitcoin starts rewarding shareholders again, and Strategy has given no reason to think it wouldn't restart. Nothing in the July 27 announcement retires the model; it just funds the obligations until the model works again.

Until then, Bitcoin really has lost its biggest corporate buyer, and the price has to climb without the company that spent five years buying almost every week.

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